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In one more sign that kids grow up fast these days, 17-year-old prodigy GM Anish Giri had what for him rates as a novel experience: losing to a younger player. At the 13th European Individual Championship now under way in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the reigning Dutch national champ fell to 15-year-old fellow prodigy GM Ilya Nyzhnyk from Ukraine. Some are already billing the game, the first over-the-board clash of the two wunderkinds, as a sneak preview of the 2020 world championship match.

In an Open Catalan (with a slew of tricky transpositions), Nyzhnyk as White wins back his gambited pawn, but Caruana obtains a perfectly defensible position, with some good squares for his knights as White struggles to get his bishop pair free. But the sense of lurking danger that usually is so highly developed in grandmasters utterly fails Black here, as he badly underestimates the power of White’s h-pawn thrust.

With seven rounds to go in Plovdiv, English GM Gawain Jones and German GM Arkady Naiditsch are part of a group of 10 players all at 5-1 in the wide-open tournament.

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He was one of those players not well known on the international circuit, but who was highly appreciated in his native land as a competitor, journalist, organizer and coach. Russian GM Yuri Razuvaev, who died last week after a lengthy illness at age 66, inspired an impressive number of tributes and eulogies from friends and compatriots for his many and varied contributions to the game.

His coaching resume was particularly impressive, working with a roster of players that included at various times world champions Anatoly Karpov and Vladimir Kramnik and women’s titleholder Alexandra Kosteniuk, while managing the juggernaut Soviet teams that won gold at the Olympiad and European team championships.

Russian-born U.S. GM Boris Gulko, who left the old Soviet Union under not the happiest of circumstances, has written a fond and admiring remembrance of his old colleague for the Russian Chess News website.

Razuvaev was no slouch over the board, with notable wins over players such as Efim Geller, Nigel Short and (a very young) Garry Kasparov. At a 1979 tournament in Dubna, Russia, Razuvaev (who won the event a year earlier) captured the best game prize for his fine attacking win against Hungarian GM Ivan Farago.

As in the previous game, White in this QGD Semi-Tarrasch signals his aggressive intentions with an h-pawn push against the Black king, and once again Black is not up to the defensive demands of the position. Black’s 13. h4 Na5 14. Ng5 h6?! (better was 14. … g6 15. Bd2 Rc8) merely creates a target for White’s coming sacrifices.